No One Else
by Prayer Machine
Summary: Anima is born. All the love leaks out of Seymour's bones.


_"I don't care about them! I need you mother, no one else!"_

She's as smooth as glass when it comes to words. Words that he can hold, caress, keep safe and tuck his heart inside and know that everything is going to be okay. She's soft in her tongue and softer in her touch, with sweeping mother's-hands that have known only grime and dirt and flowers for two years and will soon be wrapped in nothing but grime and dirt and dead flowers for years to come.

He never noticed the cracks in her voice. He never noticed how black those lines were, how terrible and aching and huge and what it meant to be trapped between the caverns of them. He never noticed that when she caressed his head and whispered that everything was going to be okay, that it never turned out okay and that everything had always gone straight to hell.

He doesn't notice because he is filled with a hungry, greedy need.

Words had come down on him shaped like arrows and cracked open his skull. But she had pieced the little bits of brain back together, sloshed the red-jelly-juice and poured it right back into his head.

And now her skull was cracked right open, and the red-jelly-juice was sloshing in pools beneath his feet.

He's ten years old and his mother isn't wiping the tears and the snot off of his face.

She's filling him instead with a feeling that swells like a fruit does, and it pushes up against his teeth until he feels them begin to crack and break. He's all snot and bones and broken bits and his mother's blood is in his eyes and in his screaming mouth and pools in the deepest recesses of his brain. And though he raises his knit-needle fingers to his face as though to hide the world, the world turns red raw anyway_. _

She is chains and bitterness and rotting flesh and hollow things that turn to bile in his stomach. Suddenly he is swelled to overflowing with lost love and regrets and guilt and days and weeks and months of hollow hearts and false smiles and he feels the cracks in her voice seer right through him now - he feels it flake, feels it break in her mouth and he screams like how she must have been screaming all the way on the insides.

Yet the chains pull on something hard in his heart, pull on something that breaks the rungs for all the other Aeons - pulls so hard that bliss and pain and sickness all pour out and mingle at once. Pulls until all the hatred flushes out of his bones and into that cauldron of emotion. And he feels such unimaginable, pain-searing, eye-burning, chain-rattle power swell so much bigger than any ten year old body can hold that he bursts.

He bursts and screams in a voice that cracks the world in two like a whip. "NO."

Fingers tie into his hair and he screams it again - quieter this time since he feels as though that one no had ripped the very voice from his throat - "NO NO NO NO." And Anima's power seethes and turns to water in his stomach and his insides churn and churn like they had done on the two-week-long boat journey from Guadosalam to Baaj. And though his voice grows weaker and hoarser, though it feels like its dying in his mouth - each 'no' flushes her out.

Yunalesca stares at him.

He's watery eyed and exhausted, vomit piling in his throat which he only manages to keep down with his shivering. Snot and anger drips from his lips, hurt makes cracks across his waterwheel eyes. He wipes his nose on his jacket, as though already making plans for life without his mother - as though already rebelling against what she would surely have rapped his hands for twenty times.

"I won't die," he whispers in a voice that's swelled beyond his years. His eyes do not tremble.

"All things die," Yunalesca began to whisper in her powdery-Vaseline voice. He sees in her his father. "You've come a long way. Surely, you have seen death on the road here. Your mother has already given her sacrifice," Yunalesca swayed in an awful way - drawing her hands out to present the beautiful stone where his mother lay in like a coffin. She lay wreathed like a flower. "Would you give up yours? Would you squander your hope, her hope, our hope?"

He remembers the bitter-swell-break-crunch of his teeth against his jaws. He remembers the punches, the kicks, the screams. He remembers his hair tugged and pulled from his scalp, he remembers his father's disappointed sneer, he remembers his mother's smile. He remembers nothing else.

All else is gone.

"I hate you," he snivels weakly - and turns and runs away.

He runs through the dead ruins, where the spirits chase his ankles and pyreflies itch around his nose. He runs down ancient paths and losses himself between the valleys of dust and building rot. He finds a summoners grave that no one has wept over and does not stop to send it.

He's filled with a bloody pulp.

But he still leaks holy mana. He can still summon, but not for long. All ready his aeons begin to despise him. Begin to sense the weakness in him. The crack that will split wide open and seek to swallow whole the world down in it.

Valefor's head is bitten off by a behemoth. She never comes again. Ifrit's spine is torn asunder and his horns are used to pick the fiend's monstrous teeth. His mother's holy magic is nowhere to be found and so nothing stitches up his bones or his torn ankles or his tired eyes. Nothing rips the fiends in half in a white-hot thunder-fire blast like her Flare once did. Nothing comes but writhing teeth and solid bones and he swears he is going to die until Ixion's horn pierces his heart, pierces the night and slits the fiend in two.

He honours him by painting him twice on his chest.

Guilt and anguish simmer in his belly like spoiled fruit. He does not feel the hunger. He does not feel the cold. The pain of it is nothing like the thousands of tiny little scratches carved across his heart - that flare up and burn with every drumming beat. He shivers out of self-pity, he yearns for chains and holy power but more than anything he yearns for soft mothering arms and an untarnished voice.

He settles on a Traveler's Sphere instead.

His ankles beaten in, his spindly legs torn up and cut, his beautiful robe hanging like rags - he gives in. He gives himself to the earth, to the cuts, to the hum of her dreaming voice and folds beneath the warmth of the Sphere. He shivers as the last bit of love floods out of him and vomits itself up on the dusty-dead earth. He vaguely prays to Yevon that no fiend will eat him whole and curls around the dying blue light.

Gagazet awaits in the morning.


End file.
